


The Second Heart

by sage_theory (papersage)



Category: Torchwood/Doctor Who
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-02
Updated: 2010-03-02
Packaged: 2017-10-07 16:09:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papersage/pseuds/sage_theory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It's not everyday a man gets to have two birthdays</i>. The Doctor visits Jack a long, long time in the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Second Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [j00j](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=j00j).



  
**I.**  
Jack was gray haired and gray eyed, worn and feeling the exhaustion of his body - even with the best medical intervention the galaxy to offer.

Well, for three hundred and ten, he was doing pretty good. Most of the parts were his original ones, and yeah maybe they'd had to replace his joints and his eyes and kidneys, but still.

He lets the medibot scan him and smiles. The way this unit has him position, it's just like the way the Master had him restrained, in the Year That Never Happened.

It's weird, but he sort of expects the medibot to say he's grown a mysterious second heart. Sure hurts like he's got more than the one.

Jack remembers the times the Master would wheel the Doctor in and make him watch. Jack would lock eyes with the Doctor - for all his other physical deformation, those eyes were the same, the exact same - and he'd convince himself that pain was pleasure while he was doing that.

Once he convinced himself so much that he actually came, a wet spot spreading across the front of his filthy pants before he realized it.

"Just because I'm an old guy and I forget, what's today's date?" he asks the medibot, quietly, as it finishes it's scan and instructs him to clothe himself again.

"What format?"

Jack thinks about it, and for nostalgia's sake says, "Standard Earth consolidated time."

"Today is Tuesday, March 1st, 2487."

Jack huffs. Today's his birthday. Literally. Somewhere on Boe, his mother is in labor, screaming and -

Jack doesn't think about the details past that. He just knows that somewhere, on Boe, he's busy being born.

He catches his white haired reflection in the medibot's shiny chrome surface and thinks that well, he was born bald and at least now he has hair. There's that.

"Today's my birthday," he says to the medibot with a smile and realizes how pathetic that sounds.

"A note will be made in your chart," is all the medibot will say, by way of happy birthday. Humor chips aren't invented for another fifty or sixty years, so robots don't smile yet, mostly.

Jack splurges on a trip to Earth, takes the daily bullet shuttle out and makes his way to Cardiff. There's a nice cemetery, now renovated to look ancient though it isn't, and he has to check the registry server at the front gates and walk back at least fifty rows and down until he finds what he wants.

In one hand he has flowers, in the other he has a sack lunch bought from a cart near the old Margaret Blaine Memorial Park, where the Wales Milennium Centre used to be.

He sits down at a grave, legs out in the artificial grass that feels like grass but doesn't smell of dirt or the clean scent of chlorophyll.

"Guess what, Ianto," he says with a slight groan as he finally touches ground. He doesn't move like he used to. "Guess, come on."

Ianto doesn't say anything back. He's dead. Also, he's not technically there. The rest of Torchwood was cremated in 2238 when storage space ran out and they could no longer afford to house bodies whole.

**II.**  
Jack was still there at the time, although he'd gone from running the show to lurking around quietly in the rank and file under the name Thomas Jefferson - you have to be slightly American for that to be very funny - and he managed to snag the job of cataloging, examining and disposing of the remains.

He remembers how well preserved they all were, and how young. He remembers that Tosh's skin was still supple and tan, her hair a shock of black against the pale of the room and sheets and the equipment.

And reaching down to touch her, he'd stripped off his gloves - it would be obscene to touch Tosh as though he did not love her, as though he did not love them all - and he caressed her check and told her that he would take very good care of her.

He pressed himself close to the crematorium window and watched her hair catch fire. The fire reflected in his eyes and Jack wept.

He wept while he handled what they had recovered of Owen, scrawny and all muscle to the last, his fish hook mouth and his long bony fingers, and he wept while he handled Gwen and his fingers traced her pale, bloodless lips and the remnant stretchmarks and the c-section scar and though she'd shown a little age, she was still young. And Ianto, ah Ianto, he looked youngest of them all.

Jack had the hardest time putting Ianto in the crematorium and for a while, he just held Ianto's hand and spoke softly too him.

"Oh god, you were so young," Jack said. "I'm sorry, Ianto, I just...I need someone to talk to. Just for a little while. Please, say something to me, Ianto, please. Ianto! Please say something to me. Please. I don't know anyone else here. I'm alone."

Ianto was silent then, as he'd been silent for over two hundred years. And Jack collapsed onto his knees after he finally shoved Ianto into the crematorium and let him burn.

Jack scraped Ianto's ashes into a neat white box that was sealed and in a row, there they were, his team. He touched each box as he left the room and that was the last day he ever worked for Torchwood.

He just couldn't stay after that. Because even if it was another thousand years, he couldn't put another team in the furnace, ever.

**  
III. **  
Jack takes out a carefully wrapped half sandwich and sets it on his lap.

"So like I was saying," Jack continues, and gets the sense that time has passed. One thing nobody ever mentioned about aging was how your memories get very, very bright before they begin to fade. How you go through a period of being so vividly in the past that you pause and leave reality.

There is a brightness before the shadow comes over you.

There is sun before the oncoming storm.

"You'll never believe it, Ianto," Jack says, looking down at his wrinkled hands. He sees an age spot and so clutches the grass to hide it. "Today is my birthday."

"Happy Birthday, Jack," says the world's most beautiful voice.

Jack's head turns and in a long brown coat that sweeps across the grass and ruffles stands the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. The wind bellows out a worshipful whistle in his presence and Jack swears the swaying branches of trees bow and shake like palm leaves to parade the coming of Caesar at his triumph, like the Muslims bowing low toward Mecca.

With that same arrogant smile and the floppy hair and those shoes - the ones that had gone in and out of style at least twenty times. He is neither old nor young, he is the heavens and the bright stars and the swirl of the time vortex and the brightness of life that comes to you unexpected. He is the constancy of change, he turns like the seasons from the vigorous, tumultuous heat of summer to the stark, haunting quiet of the winter and yet in his smile is the fiery promise of autumn and harvest, the lithe blush of spring.

More than that, he hurts, oh how he hurts Jack just by being there, and he is beautiful.

He is the Doctor.

Jack's chest is just a little tight, and he sits awestruck as the Doctor saunters over and sits next to him, resting his back against a headstone. He pats the headstone and says, "Sorry, mate, it's crowded in here."

Then he turns to Jack and points to his sandwich and asks, "Is there enough for two?"

Jack smiles and hands over half. "Always."

The Doctor takes a great, healthy bite and says nothing. He looks at the grave Jack is sitting in front of and nods in understanding.

"Good old Ianto," he says, smiling around his food.

Jack thinks, _he never got to be old_, but doesn't say it. It's not appropriate, and not the Doctor's problem. All he comes out with is, "Yeah. Good old Ianto."

"So today is your birthday," the Doctor says, with a smile.

"Yes. As we're speaking, I'm being born," he says, holding out his watch for the Doctor to see. The Doctor takes hold of it, checks it, and his grin grows brighter by an exponential factor, like the burst of the dying sun that will swallow the Earth.

"So you are!" he crows, and pats Jack's shoulder. "Congratulations."

"Congratulate my mother. She did all the work."

"Still, though. It's not everyday a man gets to have two birthdays," the Doctor replies, still grinning a mad grin. "You know if there's mistletoe around here, since it's your birthday-"

"Uh, Doctor?"

"Oh, right, that's Christmas, isn't it?" he says, and he gets that distantly confused look that Jack always thought was so wonderful. "I've had enough of Christmas for a while, I think. There's not really any birthday traditions that involve kissing, are there? I think there's something about monkeys and a zoo, but maybe that's on Mars."

Jack just grins. "Well, there is the long, time-honored tradition of birthday spanking."

"Spanking! What a dirty old man you've become," the Doctor says, and though there's an artificial disapproval in his voice, there's a lusty amusement underneath and he looks like he might wink.

Jack laughs gently, smiles. "Well, I don't know about dirty, but I'm certainly old."

"Oh, Jack," he breathes out, and his sorrow mixes with his pleasure and Jack's chest hurts a little more.

Suddenly the Doctor leaps forward and straddles him, pushing lunch out of the way. He kisses him hard, as hard as two young men desperately in love - as hard as the first time Jack ever held another cock in his hand and felt someone breathing into his mouth while they moaned back.

Maybe the Doctor's right, maybe Jack is a dirty old man, because he doesn't take long at all to get hard and the Doctor is hard right there with him. The fall sideways and they roll atop a field full of the bodies of the dead and they are obscenely, brightly alive at that moment.

They are twin stars, destined to entwine and tangle until they run out of fuel and burst and swell and then recede into darkness.

The Doctor tastes like flesh and more than flesh, he tastes of something ephemeral and Jack licks and sucks and kisses his way, trying to get at it, and the Doctor pulls up Jack's shirt and softly scrapes his teeth downward.

The Doctor undoes Jack's trousers and pulls them down, freeing his cock, already slick at the tip, to stand tall in the wind. The leaves rustle like whispers, whispers of time and crowds and the progress of eternity and Jack cries out like he's been wounded when the Doctor's lips slide tightly past the head of his cock and down to the shaft.

Jack knows he won't last long at all like this. In the old days he could go for world records, he could keep pace for hours and hours, unbothered. But now he is worn and raw to the pleasure of it, of the Doctor's tongue working the foreskin of his dick and the pressure of teeth, warning and just hard enough to make him aware that he is in the mouth of a dangerous, gorgeous beast, a god who could swallow him utterly, inside and out and tear him to shreds and throw him into a black hole - but won't, and doesn't, and hasn't.

Maybe Jack is sacreligious or simply softened in his old age, but it feels like a religious experience. It is the first time he has understood what went through the minds of all those who have thrown up their arms in a church or cried out in a temple or convulsed on the floor, overseen by snake handlers who prophesied of darkness in a joyful tone.

Because Jack knows, engulfed in a throbbing pleasure, ears ringing and wind drying the wet streaks across his chest, that there will be death and there will be the end. He knows the Earth will one day be consumed and neither ash nor dust nor bone will remain and he knows that this may be the last time he is born, that it might be the last time he sees the Doctor ever again.

And he knows he will weep and he will throw those he loves into the flames and he prays, prays while the Doctor takes him deep, takes him true, that he will be thrown into the flames of the Doctor, that the Doctor will be there at the hour of his death.

Oh, while the Doctor's hands grip his thighs he remembers youth without mourning it and he cannot find fear or anger only the acceptance that all things will end, and that it is beautiful. Oh, how it's beautiful when it hurts, when it's good, when you're wound tightly and stretched and about to pour yourself out into another person.

He remembers Utopia, and he remembers Rose, lit by a light too bright to be looked directly at as she remade him from the darkness, and he remembers the end of the universe, and he remembers the first death he died, he remembers Suzie telling him that there was something in the darkness stretching it's hand out to smite him.

Jack does not warn the Doctor that he's about to come, because he gets no warning himself. Suddenly, everything turns up a notch and he opens his eyes and colors are bright, the swaying trees are a revelation of unspeakable beauty and the grass beneath his hands is as soft as fur and he's coming, spurting himself into the Doctor's mouth.

His hips are lifted as far as they can get and the Doctor is riding him through the last convulsive moments of absolute ecstasy, holding on with a strength that Jack's never felt, a strength that doesn't hurt.

Jack lowers himself down and the Doctor's mouth slides away and before he's even settled in the grass again, he's smiling but a sob wells up and comes out of him. Tears slide from the corners of his eyes, into his hair, into the grass.

Then something hitches wrong in his chest, and the next breath he tries to take doesn't give. He gasps and his shoulder burns, aches. He can hardly move it and his chest feels like a black hole is trying to suck his heart in.

"Doctor," he gasps.

"Jack, Jack," the Doctor says, with only a minimal amount of alarm in his voice. "Jack, you're having a heart attack. Just stay calm, I'm going to get help."

"TARD- TARDIS," Jack gasps, because he knows damn well that the TARDIS has the capacity to heal him, or at least to keep him from dying.

"I'm sorry, I can't," the Doctor apologizes, stroking Jack's hair gently. He kisses Jack softly on the cheek.

"Doctor," Jack gasps, as he sees the Doctor rise and start to run away, waving his hands and calling for help.

Jack lays alone by Ianto's grave, gasping uselessly for breath he can't catch, watching the trees sway in a wind that just keeps getting more violent.

Strangers hands come, pick him up, move him check him. Official voices with official uniforms are all around, Jack is lifted up and he gasps, "Doctor. Please, Doctor."

"It's all right, mate, we're gettin' you to one as fast as we can," says one of the strangers. "More oxygen!"  
Jack still calls for the Doctor and the Doctor does not answer. He can't move because the medics have him immobilized and he cries out, tries to find the Doctor.

He needs, so very desperately, to reach out and touch the Doctor one last time. He held on to a TARDIS once, his dead body clinging to it through space and time just so he could touch the Doctor. One stupid, pissant little heart attack won't stop him.

But then he hears the TARDIS in the distance, sighing and pulsing away and suddenly the wind stops and goes dead.

Jack feels cold air breathed into entire being suddenly passes into darkness. It's too soon to tell if it's death.

**IV.**  
And it turns out that it isn't, because he wakes up feeling numbed from the neck down and a doctor, middle aged, overweight, mousy with glasses says, "It's all right, Mr. Harkness. You're in hospital now. It's lucky someone found you. I don't know why the medibot didn't catch how bad your heart was, but it did make a notation of your birthday in your chart. We'll have to have that unit looked at. You're okay now, though. We gave you a brand new artificial heart. Happy birthday."

Jack closes his eyes again, smiles into the darkness it creates, and says, "Thank you, Doctor."


End file.
